MICROSOFT AZURE SITE RECOVERY

Hybrid cloud in the form of backup and DR can be a great fit for organisations who don't want to carry the cost of an expensive Co-Lo or secondary data centres, but still need the assurance of being able to recover in the event of a disaster. Ultima recommends the Microsoft Azure Site Recovery (ASR) tool for rapid offsite cloud or on-premise recovery of IT services. Scroll down to find out more...

SUPPORTING YOUR HYBRID CLOUD JOURNEY

As a Microsoft Gold Partner for Cloud Platform, we can provide a Proof of Concept (PoC) for Azure Site Recovery which illustrates how applications, workloads and data can remain accessible during periods of downtime.

We demonstrate how to automate replication, invoke disaster recovery (DR) and monitor protected instances - before recovering to normal working conditions in an orderly manner using the Azure portal and runbooks.

While we can explain the benefits of having a Disaster Recovery as a Service solution, our engagement also shows how your organisation can continue functioning during, and after, an adverse event - without the cost and ongoing management that is normally associated with non-cloud DR solutions.

BUSINESS BENEFITS

Operational Monthly Costs

DR is charged to the business as an ongoing OPEX cost

Failover and Failback

ASR allows you to orchestrate the failover and failback of virtual and physical machines

First Month Free

The first month of any server being protected does not incur any charge, this is a huge enabler for POCs

Regularly Test Scenarios

Test continuity plans or run dev-test copies of production workloads without impacting users; test new versions of apps with copies of live data, then seamlessly put into production

Low RPO and RTO

Achieve low recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) targets of minutes for every major system in your organisation, simply and cost effectively

UK Data Centres

Stay in line with Data Sovereignty requirements and guarantee your data stays in the UK; Site Recovery is ISO 27001:2013, 27018, HIPAA, DPA certified, and is in the process of SOC2 and FedRAMP JAB assessments

Export Runbooks

Azure allows you to export your recovery plan process and detailed output in order to validate any auditing processes

Per Server Cost

DR is charged per server so that costs can go up and down on a monthly basis as the organisation adds or removes servers to be protected

Easy to Use Management Tool

The whole process is managed from the cloud in the now familiar Azure Resource Manager portal with easy to use getting started wizards

TECHNICAL BENEFITS

Server Protection

Most organisations will have a mix of virtual and physical servers - ASR has the ability to protect physical servers as well as virtual environments, so that the entire estate can be protected with one tool

Supports Hyper-V and VMware

Today most of the virtual infrastructures found in the wild are based around the industry standard VMware vSphere hypervisor; this is fully supported by ASR

Runbooks and Azure Automation

This can be as simple as virtual machine power-up and power-down, but can also inject runbooks from Azure Automation - allowing you to do virtually anything inside of Azure during a failover or failback

VSS Compliant

ASR gives you the ability to failover to snapshots that were taken in compliance with VSS so that you can guarantee your data is consistent after a failover

Unlimited Testing

Test failovers allow you to recreate your environment in an isolated bubble network without affecting the live servers, also allowing replication to DR to continue in the background

Array Agnostic

There is no dependency on specific storage manufacturers or protocols, so data can be replicated from any source including local disks